Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I pushed ahead blindly, the ground becoming a little rough and uneven under my feet, until the lessening of the dust-sting against the skin of my face told me I must be coming out on the other side of the time change line. I opened my eyes.

I stood now in rugged territory. If I was not among mountains, then certainly I was in the midst of some steep hills. Directly ahead of me was some sort of massive concrete structure, too large for me to see in its entirety. The part I was able to see was a mass of ruins, with new grass sprouting at odd points among the tumbled blocks of what had evidently been walls and ceilings.

What had smashed it up so thoroughly was hard to imagine. It didn’t look so much as if it had been bombed as if it had been picked up and twisted, the way you might twist a wet towel to wring it dry. About it, the steep slopes, covered with gravel and a few fir and spruce trees, looked deserted under the cloudless, midday sky. The air temperature was perceptibly cooler than it had been on the other side of the mistwall, as if I was now at a noticeably higher altitude—though I had not felt the elevator-sort of inner ear sensations that would suggest a sudden change to a lower air pressure. There were no birds visible and no sounds of insects. Of course, if this new land was high enough it could be above the flight zone of most insects.

However, whatever the structure before me had been at one time, now it was a ruin only. There was no sign of life anywhere. It was far-fetched to think that there could be anyone in that pile of rubble who might have a greater understanding of the time storm than I did, let alone ideas on how to live with it or deal with it. I might as well go back through the mistwall to Marie, Wendy and the dogs.

But I hesitated. There was a reluctance in me to cut short this business of being off on my own—almost as much reluctance as there was in me to face Marie and admit the whole experiment of going through the mistwall had been profitless. I compromised with myself finally; it would do no harm to go around the ruin and a little farther into this new territory, until I could see the whole extent of it and perhaps make some guess as to what it had once been. The concrete of what was left of it appeared as modern, or more so, than anything in my native time—it might even have come from a few years beyond my original present.

It was an odd feeling that was pushing me to explore farther—a small feeling, but a powerful one. There was something about that jumble of concrete that plucked at my problem-solving mental machinery and beckoned it.

I swung to the right, approaching the ruin and circling it at the same time. As I got closer, the building turned out to be larger even than it had looked at first, and it was not possible to see it all at once. After a while, however, I got to where I could get a sight down one long side line of it. I still could not really see it as a whole, because it curved away from me, following the contours of the hill on which it was built; but it seemed to become progressively less of a ruin as its structure receded from me, and its interest to me grew. It reminded me a little of my own life, beginning as a wreck and developing into something with a shape, purposeful, but too big to see and know as a whole. I felt almost as if the building was something familiar, like an old friend built out of concrete; and I prowled further on alongside it.

It continued to sprawl out and curve away from me as I went; and after I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile, I realized that I never would be able to see the thing as a whole. It was simply too big, and it spread out in too many directions.

I might have turned back then; but I noticed that the building was relatively undamaged in the further area of it I had now reached. Facing me were some windows that were whole, in sections of grey concrete wall that looked untouched. Farther on, there was even a door that looked slightly ajar—as if it needed only to be pushed to open to let anyone into the interior.

I went toward the door. It was a heavy, fire-door type; and when I put my weight into it and pulled, it swung outward slowly. Inside was a flight of bare concrete stairs with black iron pipe railing, leading upward. I mounted the stairs slowly and quietly, the rifle balanced in my hands, ready to use, even while the sensible front of my mind told me that this was ridiculous. I was wasting my time on a deserted and destroyed artifact; and it was high time I was heading back to Marie and Wendy, who would be worrying about me by now.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I let myself through another door into a long corridor, with only a bare white wall and window to my left, windows through which the sun was now striking brilliantly, but aglitter with glass doors and interior windows to my right, through which I could see what seemed to be row on row of offices and laboratories.

I took a step down the corridor, and something plucked lightly at the cuff of my left pantleg. I looked down. What appeared to be a small black thread had been fastened to the wall of each side of the corridor and now lay broken on the floor where my leg had snapped it.

“Who’s there?” asked a voice over my head.

I looked up and saw the grille of a speaker—obviously of some public address system that had been built into this corridor when the whole structure had been put up.

“Hello?” said the voice. It was tenor-weight, a young man’s voice. “Who is it? Just speak up. I can hear you.”

Cautiously, I took a step backward. I was as careful as I could be in picking up my foot and putting it down again. But still, when the sole of my boot touched the corridor surface, there was a faint, gritting noise.

“If you’re thinking of going back out the way you came in,” said the voice, “don’t bother. The doors are locked now. It’s part of the original security system of this installation; and I’ve still got power to run it.”

I took two more quick, quiet steps back and tried the door to the stairway. The door handle was immovable and the door itself stood motionless against my strongest push.

“You see?” said the voice. “Now, I don’t mean to keep you prisoner against your will. If you want to leave, I can let you out. I just thought we might talk.”

“Can you see me?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “But I’ve got instruments. Let’s see... you’re about two hundred and ninety centimeters tall and weigh eighty-two point five three plus kilos. On the basis of voice tone and body odors, you’re male, blood temperature approximately half a degree above normal, heartbeat fifty-eight—cool-headed customer, plainly—blood pressure a hundred and eight over eighty-seven. You’re wearing some synthetics, but mostly wool and leather by weight—outdoor clothes. My mechanical nose also reports you as carrying a combination of metal, wood, oil and other odors that imply a rifle of some kind, plus some other metal that may be a knife; and according to the other scents you carry, you’ve been outside this building only a little while after coming from some place with a lot of grass, few trees and a warmer, moister climate.”

He stopped talking.

“I’m impressed,” I said, to start him up again. I did not trust his promise to let me go just for the asking; and I was looking around for some way out besides the locked door. There were the windows—how many stairs had I climbed on the way up? If I could break through a window, and the drop was not far to the ground....

“Thank you,” said the voice. “But it’s no credit to me. It’s the equipment. At any rate, reading from what I have here, you’re out exploring rather than looking for trouble. You aren’t carrying equipment or supplies for living outdoors, even though the odors on you say that’s how you’ve been living. That means such equipment and supplies you have must be elsewhere. You wouldn’t be likely to leave them unattended—some animal might chew them up to get at whatever food you were carrying, so you probably have others with you. They aren’t in view anywhere around the area outside the building, or I’d know about them, and you’re the only one inside, besides me; so that means you just about had to come through that stationary line of temporal discontinuity, out there.”